Another View: Trump cancels Afghan reality show

Tuesday

Sep 10, 2019 at 8:14 PM

President Donald Trump envisioned a grand, diplomatic success and televised spectacle rolled into one. He would produce, direct and star in a grand moment in American history: the end of 18 years of bloody conflict in Afghanistan. Then he canceled his reality show soon after announcing it.

The potential fallout from Trump's weekend dalliance with an Afghan peace summit at Camp David in Maryland extends beyond the scrapped event. A peace deal that had been moving toward fruition is now in doubt. So is the fate of 14,000 U.S. soldiers deployed in Afghanistan, who might have been headed toward withdrawal. One thing is clear: Trump's seat-of-his-pants handling of the Afghan peace process is likely to lead to more violence and bloodshed in a country ravaged by nearly two decades of war.

It didn't have to happen this way. Leading up to the weekend, the U.S. appeared on the verge of an agreement with the Taliban. Under a deal "reached in principle" between Trump's envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Taliban leaders, the U.S. would withdraw 5,400 troops within 135 days, with the rest of the 14,000 U.S. soldiers coming home within 16 months. In exchange for the start of troop withdrawals, the Taliban would agree to sever ties with Al-Qaida.

There were still important elements yet to be hammered out. What mechanism would the U.S. rely on to ensure that the Taliban lived up to its pledge to never allow Afghanistan to become a haven for Al-Qaida and other anti-West terrorist groups? Would the peace agreement safeguard the rights of women, who were horribly mistreated and oppressed during Taliban rule? And would a deal pave the way for substantive peace talks between the Taliban and the democratically elected Afghan government?

Hosting Taliban leaders and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani at Camp David to finalize an agreement was Trump's idea, The New York Times reported. The meeting would have been steeped in symbolism — held at the retreat where presidents host prime ministers and kings, the place where Jimmy Carter once brokered a historic peace pact between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. The proposed timing also resonated: just before Sept. 11.

Trump didn't want the meeting to happen after a deal had been reached. He wanted to be the person who cinched the deal, the Times reported. He rushed it.

What Trump apparently didn't realize was that the Taliban wanted a deal with the U.S. first, and did not want direct negotiations with Ghani beforehand. Then, last Thursday, Trump was told that a suicide car bombing killed a U.S. soldier, along with 11 others. On Saturday night, Trump surprised his aides by tweeting that he had planned to host Ghani and the Taliban at Camp David, but canceled the meeting after finding out about the bombing. Every soldier's death is tragic, yet the serviceman's death was the 16th to happen this year. All that time, talks between the U.S. and the Taliban have been ongoing.

The lesson here isn't that Trump was wrong to reach for a peace pact, but that presidents shouldn't value drama over diplomacy.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

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